eLearning club: Empowering ECD Community

First 3 years of a child's life are characterized by rapid brain development, shaped by access to stimulation and nurturing care through empowering Early Child Development (ECD) community. In India, children under3 remain relatively ignored due to lack of effective outreach or home visiting programs and ignorance among caregivers. Our ongoing programs empowering workforce and caregivers demonstrated positive shifts in ECD outcomes.

e-Learning clubs of caregivers and workforce will create a reinforcing ecosystem, using contextually relevant resources for ECD. This will create an environment for continuous learning to identify the most relevant solutions to their childcare needs. High reach of e-technology with locally adaptable interventions makes it potentially scalable. Sustainability will be ensured by partnership with government and potential opportunities of creating social enterprise in high income areas.  

Our program addresses SDG4, ensuring inclusive access to quality ECD services by promoting lifelong learning, for sustainable community development and nation building.

India is home to the largest child population in the world, 158 million children below 6 years 15.42% of the population. Despite improvements in child survival indicators, this has not translated into an equitable improvement in “thrive”. The Government of India notified a National ECCE Policy and Curriculum Framework in 2013 and 2014 respectively for the holistic development of all children. However, access to good quality ECD, through the ECD Anganwadi Centers under the Integrated Child Development Scheme remains challenging. One of the reasons is lack of ongoing mentoring support to the local ECD workforce and low engagement with communities and caregivers in ECD programs. The government’s capacity to adapt and implement mentoring, capacity-building and community engagement initiatives for the ECD program needs strengthening as well. 

These need new ways for leading and managing the workforce capacity building and community engagement programs for ECD, at each level of the sub-system, up to the ultimate recipient and building the relationship with community. Furthermore, the acceptance of ECD services by caregivers is slow due to limited knowledge and awareness about ECD programs among parents. Existing available technology has the potential to drive these changes by empowering the community and workforce. 

To empower caregivers and local-workforce from underserved rural areas to identify local solutions to their ECD needs, we will form e-Learning clubs of caregivers and service-providers that will foster, learn, provoke conversations and encourage resource sharing that matter for ECD.  We will use available technology, adapted to local context for enhancing competencies around ECD. 

Our existing program ‘Stepping-Stones’ has shown that strengthening the capacity of caregivers and workforce at local level brings desired positive changes in the motor, language, and socioemotional development of children under three years. 

We will co-create an e-Resource platform and will be easily accessible to caregivers and service providers, and aimed at improving the quality of ECD programs.  

e-Learning club will meet once a month at the village to discuss and share their stories. A mentor will join virtually by video conferencing to facilitate discussion. Sessions will adapt reflective learning approaches. Participants will narrate their stories/challenges and the group will derive learnings, key takeaways, and share resources. Ongoing, real-time live mentoring will provide a lifelong learning opportunity. 

Sessions will be video recorded and made available on e-Resource platform. Core team will follow-up and monitor activities, using Measurement-for-Change principles to ensure fidelity.  

Target population will be caregivers of children under-3 and ECD workforce. We will work with local government and women's groups at the village level to create eLearning clubs. The aim is to enhance parental and workforce competencies in food/nutrition, shelter/care, protection/discipline, health, Psychosocial Development and play/stimulation domains.  The earlier formative work with community and government helped us identify the need for mentoring and support.

Our earlier cluster RCT has suggested even in underserved and socially/economically disadvantaged groups, support and continued ongoing mentoring of caregivers shows medium effect at community level in child development outcomes. Our photostory initiative has been made possible to bring the positive shifts in emotional closeness between caregivers and children.

Program will bring out positive changes in knowledge and competencies of caregivers and workforce, which will enhance access to quality ECD services for every child in the region and ensure thrivability of children from vulnerable communities and disadvantage rural areas in India. Program will address SDG-4 ensuring inclusive access to quality ECD services for sustainable community development and nation building.

In the first phase we aimed to impact the lives of around 50000 children under 3 years from two districts, Nagpur and Wardha in Central India. 

Our problem and proposed solutions aligned with the maternal and child health theme. India is home to the largest child population in the world and in-spite significant improvement in child survival indicators, this has not translated into an equitable improvement in “thrive”. Empowering and ongoing mentoring support to mothers and service-providers is critical to bring a shift in thinking within the system and community beyond survival. 

The scalable solution directly impacts lives of caregivers and young children, which have high potential for stronger families and significantly contribute to generational change positively and ultimately the community and national building (Prof Hackman).  

Our solutions innovatively make use of existing technology for creating change using the locally relevant resources. The solution aims to create a reinforcing ecosystem of change by empowering the community of caregivers and local workforce, which is likely to be sustainable for longer term. The technology we are proposing has been successfully used in education and other related sectors, therefore less likely to face challenges in implementing. 

Our solution  is addressing the problems around child development, and also addressing SDG 2. Professor Heckman’s recent research looks at the life outcomes among children exposed to care and stimulating environments in early life. Heckman finds that those children who participated received the nurturing care and stimulation had significant gains in personal and family life outcomes that provided their children with positive multi-generation effects on education, health, employment and civic life. Early childhood care and stimulation  resulted in stronger families and significantly contributed to upward mobility in the next generation—an indication that early childhood education can be an effective way to break the cycle of poverty.

We propose to use the existing technology, which has been proved to be useful in many sectors, especially in education. We are exploring the possibility of its use for empowering caregivers and service providers and also for community mobilisations. High penetration of mobile data service throughout India (India has more mobile than toilets - UN),  we hope the accessibility to technology may not be a challenge and it will be more likely to be adapted by the community easily.

Our long term goal is to contribute to community development and thereby nation building by directly addressing the SDG goal 2 and indirectly addressing the SDG2. We intend to bring this change by creating a reinforcing ecosystem which will be more likely to be relevant and sustainable for ECD. We hope to bring out this change by empowering the community of caregivers and ECD workforce.

first year 5000.

by end of five year we will reach 100000

we will overcome these barriers  recruiting local volunteer we will called it as a Peer Mentor

Full time staff: 7

Part-time staff: 2

Contractors: 3

In early 2013, we started our work locally with the Government’s AWC locally under Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), a flagship program with Government of India. The primary goal was to support and empower the Anganwadi workers (AWW) to deliver the preschool curriculum. 

March 2015, we received first seed grant from Grand Challenges Canada under Saving Brains Initiative Round-4. The purpose of this grant was to develop a proof of concept to promote ECD through the Anganwadi Centers (AWC) and evaluate it through the rigorous cluster RCT.  

2016 – in one of the community The program was christened as ‘Stepping Stones’ and the larger vision was to develop a sustainable, locally adaptive model to promote the ECD in rural area with potential of scaling through the government ICDS program.

Sept 2016, evaluation of proof concept shows that our enhance Anganwadi curriculum and community meetings/home visiting interventions shows in  mild to moderate effect on cognitive, motor, language and socio-emotional development scores of children under 5 years. The stimulation program for the children under 3 years of age, the most critical age was missing. 

March 2017-  received the second seed grant from GCC – SB initiatives R5. In this grant we address the gaps that were observed in previous proof of concept. The program was primarily focus on first 1000 days of life. 

The goal of the program was to develop and evaluate the proof of concept of maternal nutrition and parenting program on the ECD in first 1000 days of life. 

Projects under Saving Brains Program of Grand Challenges, Canada:

DMIMS received  Seed Grant of 250000 CAD for the project titled “Scaling Early Childhood Development at Anganwadi Centers in India” under Saving Brains Round-4 programme supported by Grand Challenges, Canada 

Also a Seed Grant of 250000 CAD was awarded to DMIMS for the project titled “Effectiveness of Maternal Nutrition and Parenting Programme on Cognitive development of children at 2 years of age: A Cluster RCT” under Saving Brains programme Round-5.

Tribal health Project supported by Wildlife Conservation Trust, Mumbai: A project title “Community based participatory research in Tribal Health” is a comprehensive mobile health programme being implemented by DMIMS in forest buffer zone of Pench in Maharashtra.

Project supported by USAID through Harvard University: Under the Project titled “Rapid diagnosis of frail and sick newborns and pregnant women with a handheld Vital Sign Monitor”, an Android tablet based App and technology was developed by Interdisciplinary team.

Mahan Trust (Saving Lives & Building Healthy Community) MAHAN(Meditation,De-Addiction,Health,AIDS,Nutrition) is a 'Non for Profit' & 'Non Government' organization providing preventive & curative medical facilities to tribal of Melghat. Electronic Data Management, supported by Research Cell, DMIMS (DU) is an innovative unit to improve data management of Mahan Trust, India. 

Programme Supported by Summit Institute of development, Indonesia: Interdisciplinary Team of DMIMS and YCCE, Nagpur was also engaged in Qualcomm Wireless Reach with a Grant amount of 30000 USD during 2016-17 for project titled “Thrive Multisite Study: Open SRP for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health”. 

Currently we are working on the socially and economically disadvantaged area adjacent to the forest buffer zone in central India, which provides very little opportunity for developing a business model at this phase. We shall be exploring the possibility for the same in future. As of now, our path to scale is through the Government's Anganwadi program. 

However, we will explore the opportunity for creating the social business model and additional revenue stream in the high income Urban area through our existing enterprise, ICareKid.  We will be working on the same in next phase. 

We developed a program that has potential to scale. The focus was on outcome, however the delivery channel was adapted to need of beneficiaries from urban and rural area. We registered a two start-ups for urban and rural area.

• iCareKid  for urban area
• Social Innovation lab for rural area

More detail description of the scalable innovation, implementation channels and sustainable models ae given in subsequent section.

Next Steps:

March 2020- we are formally launching a our scalable and replicable model on 11th March 2020. Will be conducting a prelaunch pilot training, followed by  press-conference and official launch in Nagpur City, Maharashtra, India. 

The first phase in the rural area, primary path to scale and sustainability is through the Governments ICDS program.  we will explore the opportunity for creating the social business model and additional revenue stream in the high income Urban area through our existing enterprise, ICareKid.  We will be working on the same in next phase